Film Info
The Act of Killing

Film Information

Exhibition Title	The Act of Killing
Director	Joshua Oppenheimer
Country
Year	2012
Format	DCP
Colour	Color
Duration	159'

Cast:

Anwar Congo, Herman Koto, Syamsul Arifin, Ibrahim Sinik, Yapto Soerjosoemarno

Credits:

CD: Christine Cynn, Anonymous
F: Lars Skree, Carlos Mariano Arango de Montis
E: Niels P. Andersen, Janus B. Jansen,
Mariko Montpetit, Charlotte M. Bengtsen, Ariadna F. Mestre, Erik Andersson
S: Elin Øyen Vister
M: Elin Øyen Vister
P: Signe Byrge Sørensen
PE: Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, André Singer, Joram ten Brink, Torstein Grude
CP: Final Cut for Real

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Synopsis

The extraordinary film The Act of Killing visualizes the subjects of fascist discourse, whom we would always like to see portrayed as monsters. But the fact that a torturer and member of the Indonesian paramilitary group Pancasila is the main character doesn’t imply that the film wants to symbolically lynch him in order to purify any fascist nuance spectators might have. Oppenheimer’s lucidity consists in him evoking the figure of the scape goat while finding in his assassin’s humanity the ideological and psychological triggers that make a man capable of killing thousands of people –and suggest how a social and economic system can subjectivize its creatures so they will obey a mandate. If this film deals with delirium, it’s not the one Anwar Congo and his buddies experience –they are called gangsters, a very heterodox way of meaning “free men”. It’s enough to see the segments of a celebration in the paramilitary group, or a TV interview where Congo describes the film he’s participating in. At first, the delirium is a collective one: peoples can be delirious, and fascism naturalized as mass spectacle is the proof of that. RAK